Ghosts
by Orion Kohaishu
Summary: -Graverobber- "Kid, is that you? I thought you'd died." "I did. Or I didn't. I'm not sure I was ever even alive." Existentialist, graveyard musings.


**Title**: Ghosts

**Author**: Orion Kohaishu

**Rating**: T, for language and squicky dead things

**Summary**: "Kid, is that you? I thought you'd died." "I did. Or I didn't. I'm not sure I was ever even alive."

**Disclaimer**: Ummm, yeah. I finally wrote a Repo! fic. If you knew me in real life, you would know that this is a loooong time coming.

**Author's Note**: Oddly enough, if you read this fic at a speed of 120 bpm while watching the movie adaptation of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," it syncs perfectly.

Not really. :D

. .

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

. .

He hums a ditty while he works.

Hunched like a scavenger over a newly killed corpse, a hand as pale as death twists the rubber neck -- GeneCo deals in vertebrae with increasing frequency -- to stare at the hazy night sky. Vacant, glassy eyes absorb a vacant, lifeless canopy, and he shivers to have forgotten what stars look like. Archaic tools, like a madman's childhood creation, are procured from an inner coat pocket and greeted like old friends. A needle is inserted through the nose and then -- There! A telltale flash of blue in a greyscale landscape.

He doesn't come often to this cemetery, not anymore. It is one of the older in town, the steady stream of fresh bodies slowed to a trickle... and her. He still thinks about her sometimes, when the moon is full and the pathetic ghostly glimmer casts skin sallow and eyes sunken like she had looked. He wonders what has become of her more so; he has yet to find her petite body among the others, but knows it is only a matter of time. A mouse can't survive long in the lion's den.

Another day goes by, and he doesn't think of her at all.

Shilo Wallace is a ghost, a memory. Fifteen minutes of fame died down and her picture slowly faded from view, her name stopped whispering across lips when her story stopped shocking a nation that had its emotions surgically removed. There is a rumor that she has fled the island, found her way to another city to the east, the west. Another that she hides in the tower overlooking them all and runs the world behind another's name. More still that she has died.

He is more inclined to believe that one. No one knows better than him that everything dies, especially sheltered little girls without fathers or ghosts to hide behind. If he had to be honest with himself, he would admit he only comes to this cemetery now because he knows this will not be the one he finds her in.

Humming and buzzing flits past him, and he smiles at the long-legged insect: she used to chase bugs. He doesn't know why he remembers that fact, that single moment of memory evoked by her name. He first spotted her chasing bugs. Gawky, awkward limbs and stupid, childish wonder tripping headlong into danger after a simple bug. Eyes wide, lips parted, brow furrowed. Like a child.

His skin prickles again to have forgotten what childhood is.

In the still silence of the dead he allows himself a moment of whimsy, dropping to sit behind a gravestone, he squeezes his eyes shut and pretends -- to remember. He remembers stars, or what they could have been, but the sky is the color of the drug because he cannot remember any other shade of blue. Stars look like candle flames. Tiny little knives, or blades, erupt from the ground beneath him and he calls them grass but hesitates to touch them; would they strike back? His arm itches in his coat, and it distracts him. A sigh and a scratch, and he remembers that he forgot his childhood years before, and the vision is lost.

There's no wonder left in the world, he muses. No joy. No children. Although not the youngest he's met, she was certainly the first child... wonder and magic and shock and dismay. Betrayal and forgiveness. He wonders if the world could be cured if there were more children in it.

It's not the thought that scares him; there's not much in this world that does. Not dead, nor dying, nor what comes after... ghosts are not a nightmare in his world. This world is filled with ghosts. He tells himself that his comfort with the dead, his peace in the cemeteries, comes from their honesty: in this world of ghosts and decay, it is only the dead who admit what they are, what they've lost. It's a sad world indeed when the dead are the only ones left who can grieve.

Whimsy and nonsense, he scoffs, and rises from the ground to shake himself sane again. Sitting and mourning is a luxury offered only to the corpses around him.

But sentiment is a purely human emotion, and deep beneath his layers of cynicism and bravado there is still a measure of what makes him human. He heads for the mausoleum, knowing that all he will find there tonight is old bodies and more feelings. Respects, he tells himself is what he has come to pay at the Wallace crypt, respects for the dead and nothing more. Not guilt, and certainly not regrets. The light burned out here months ago, now that the last of the line has passed, and there are never flowers anymore. His respects feel cheap.

Entering the tomb is like feeling death for the first time. The air here is stale and stagnant, the ground undisturbed where his feet have not tread; as though this place exists outside of time. Outside of life or death. Limbo. He's almost afraid that, should he linger, he won't ever be able to leave. "Shit," he speaks for the first time that night. "I'm sorry." In his head he's apologizing to the dead for disturbing them, and not the family for leading their daughter down the dark path of the outside world and causing her death.

He turns to leave before the lingering feeling of lethargy claims a fresh soul, and a small rustling noise comes from somewhere in the shadows beyond the twin coffins. Like a mouse, he thinks, and knows then that his little mouse survived the lion.

"Kid," he asks, "Is that you?" His whisper echoes off the walls as he strains his eyes in the low light. There's not a chance this molding sack of skin and bones is anything living, and not a chance it's the girl he knew. "I thought you'd died."

Soft, racking laughter responds. "I did," she whispers in her raspy, skeleton voice. He shudders. "Or I didn't. I'm not sure I was ever even alive."

It makes perfect sense to him. He's not sure if he remembers how to be alive, anyway.


End file.
